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JG here, from the identity and access team at Microsoft. As you probably remember, last year at RSA Conference USA, Microsoft announced availability of Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007, which joined user provisioning and certificate & smartcard management in a single integrated offering. For far too long, the industry has treated two related functions – identity management & strong authentication – as fundamentally dissimilar things. This despite the fact that customers have stressed that they are not! Both functions are connected by Identity and its related workflows – the act of provisioning a user identity is deeply connected with issuing a certificate or a smartcard to that Identity. ILM 2007 sought to address this very need.

Full Article – http://blogs.msdn.com/rsa2008/archive/2008/04/10/ilm-2-coming-soon-and-it-s-all-about-tco.aspx

JG here, from the identity and access team at Microsoft. As you probably remember, last year at RSA Conference USA, Microsoft announced availability of Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007, which joined user provisioning and certificate & smartcard management in a single integrated offering. For far too long, the industry has treated two related functions – identity management & strong authentication – as fundamentally dissimilar things. This despite the fact that customers have stressed that they are not! Both functions are connected by Identity and its related workflows – the act of provisioning a user identity is deeply connected with issuing a certificate or a smartcard to that Identity. ILM 2007 sought to address this very need.

Full Article – http://blogs.msdn.com/rsa2008/archive/2008/04/10/ilm-2-coming-soon-and-it-s-all-about-tco.aspx

Solution providers who spend a considerable amount of time on the road have a new tool in their traffic-avoidance arsenal. Microsoft announced its Clearflow technology, which uses complicated algorithms to predict shifts in traffic, went online on the company’s Live Maps Website.

Microsoft said the free service, which is currently available for 72 U.S. cities, could help drivers avoid making detours to routes overcrowded due to the original traffic jam. According to a report in The New York Times, Clearflow is the result of a five-year project by Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division at Microsoft Research laboratories.

Full Article – http://crn.com/software/207200205;jsessionid=VVRHLGC2ONRQCQSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN

Solution providers who spend a considerable amount of time on the road have a new tool in their traffic-avoidance arsenal. Microsoft announced its Clearflow technology, which uses complicated algorithms to predict shifts in traffic, went online on the company’s Live Maps Website.

Microsoft said the free service, which is currently available for 72 U.S. cities, could help drivers avoid making detours to routes overcrowded due to the original traffic jam. According to a report in The New York Times, Clearflow is the result of a five-year project by Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division at Microsoft Research laboratories.

Full Article – http://crn.com/software/207200205;jsessionid=VVRHLGC2ONRQCQSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN

In my in-box Saturday morning was an invite for an April 24 event in San Francisco, where Microsoft plans to offer more details on its Live Mesh service. Ray Ozzie first hinted at the project during his speech at last month’s Mix event in Las Vegas.

Live Mesh is expected to be a service that synchronizes data between a number of different devices. Microsoft has talked about a long-term vision in which you need to only store things once, in the cloud, and have them appear on various devices. For example, music could be licensed once and appear on multiple gadgets without having to go through the more cumbersome process of transferring it from the original source. Likewise, contacts and other data could more easily be sent down to PCs and other devices.

Full Article – http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9917378-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

In my in-box Saturday morning was an invite for an April 24 event in San Francisco, where Microsoft plans to offer more details on its Live Mesh service. Ray Ozzie first hinted at the project during his speech at last month’s Mix event in Las Vegas.

Live Mesh is expected to be a service that synchronizes data between a number of different devices. Microsoft has talked about a long-term vision in which you need to only store things once, in the cloud, and have them appear on various devices. For example, music could be licensed once and appear on multiple gadgets without having to go through the more cumbersome process of transferring it from the original source. Likewise, contacts and other data could more easily be sent down to PCs and other devices.

Full Article – http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9917378-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint manages and integrates multiple scan engines from industry-leading vendors and provides content controls to help protect your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 collaboration environments from documents that contain malicious code, confidential information, and inappropriate content. Forefront Security for SharePoint provides comprehensive protection against the latest threats to help ensure documents are safe before they are saved to or retrieved from the SharePoint document library. In addition, documents can be scanned for company sensitive information, profanity or other administrator-defined content policies. The new Forefront Security for SharePoint with SP2 provides an improved user experience around file uploads, manual scanning, keyword filtering, and program administration. Through deep integration with Office SharePoint 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Forefront Security for SharePoint helps protect your collaboration environment while maintaining uptime and optimizing performance. Forefront Security for SharePoint also enables administrators to easily manage product configuration, operation, automated antivirus signature updates and reporting at the server and enterprise level.

Customers who purchase Forefront Security for SharePoint with Service Pack 2 to protect Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0 will also be licensed to use Antigen for SharePoint to protect Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 environments.

Full Article – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e06453b8-b2dd-4177-969c-2f89aa841e11&DisplayLang=en

SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Beta release for the ADO.Net Entity Framework Beta 3 enables the following scenarios:

• Applications can work in terms of a more application-centric conceptual model, including types with inheritance, complex members, and relationships
• Applications are freed from hard-coded dependencies on a particular data engine or storage schema
• Mappings between the conceptual application model and the storage-specific schema can change without changing the application code
• Developers can work with a consistent application object model that can be mapped to various storage schemas, possibly implemented in different database management systems
• Multiple application models can be mapped to a single storage schema
• Language-integrated query support provides compile-time syntax validation for queries against a conceptual model

For more information please see the ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 Documentation and ADO.NET Entity Framework Samples
Post feedback and questions to SQL Server Compact 3.5 MSDN Forum and ADO.NET MSDN Forum
For tips and tricks visit SQL Server Compact blog and ADO.Net team blog

Full Article – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68539fae-cf03-4c3b-aeda-769cc205fe5f&DisplayLang=en

‘m so glad to finally announce that the latest version of Live Maps is online and ready for you to play with. This ended up being a much bigger release than originally planned including three full sprints of development. As always the changes visible in the user interface only scratch the surface of the dozens of improvements across the application tiers including Geocoding enhancements, browser compatibility (Safari and IE8), parsing improvements, reverse geocoding, printing improvements and tons more. We are also releasing an upgrade of our Map Control to version 6.1 for developers. Give it a try and let us know what you think by dropping a comment here or emailing me at Stevelom at microsoft d com.

Export your Collection to Your Navigation/GPS device. One of the most common complaints we hear from users is that there is no easy way to get waypoints onto their Nav system from a web map. In this release we added support to export Collections to KML, GPX and GeoRSS which you can load directly to just about any portable Navigation system. No funky network links to get in your way – when you do an export the resulting file contains the geometry your nav system needs without having to be connected to the net. You can now plan your trip on the web by creating a Collection of Waypoints, then use the Export feature to take them with you on the road.

Full Article – http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!14129.entry

How to configure Windows SteadyState – a completely free toolkit from Microsoft that helps administrators take control of shared access computers running Windows XP.

If you missed the first part in this article series please read Protect Public Computers with Windows SteadyState, Part 1

Part 1 of this series was a short introduction to Windows SteadyState (WSS). In this part we will see how easy it is to get in the game.

The next, and final article in this series, will introduce you to version 2.5 of this wonderful toolkit – the first version to support Windows Vista.

Full Article – http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Protect-Public-Computers-Windows-SteadyState-Part2.html

New month, new drama in the virtualization world. After the hot debate about the VMware ESX memory overcommit capabilities that involved Citrix, Microsoft and obviously VMware, this time is the turn of the virtual machine migration capabilities included in ESX and upcoming Hyper-V.

Once again Mike DiPetrillo, Specialist System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis department at VMware, ignited the fire comparing ESX VMotion with Hyper-V Quick Migration, stating that the latter has an excessive gap (8 seconds at the best) in resuming the virtual machines and causes severe faults in networked applications like database servers or file servers (technical details are covered here and here).

Full Article – http://www.virtualization.info/2008/04/vmware-esx-vmotion-vs-microsoft-hyper-v.html

Since writing Part One of this series back in January 2008, a number of things have happened with regards to Windows 7, the next Windows version. First, there’s been an amazing amount of silliness and speculation about the Windows 7 release date, in part due to off the cuff remarks from outgoing Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, but mostly because of bored (and boring) tech pundits who are eager to write about something controversial. Second, I’ve finally gotten my hands on Windows 7 build 6519, the first external build of Windows 7 to make the rounds outside the hallowed halls of Microsoft. In this part of my Shipping Seven series, I’d like to discuss both developments.

Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/win7_shipping_02.asp

Nvidia’s chairman has lashed out at Intel, calling the company’s integrated graphics “a joke”.

The comments, reported in DailyTech, clearly indicate Nvidia’s unease at Intel’s growing interest in the graphics market which has traditionally been its stronghold.

Speaking on a conference call to analysts, Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang insisted that even a told-fold increase in the performance of Intel’s integrated graphics would still leave the chip giant lagging behind Nvidia in terms of performance.

Full Article – http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/186807/nvidia-boss-lashes-out-at-intel.html

Generally speaking, I like to focus my blogs on what we’re doing at Microsoft regarding Hyper-V virtualization and pretend the rest of the Internet doesn’t exist. However, there’s some buzz on the web about a topic that I feel I need to address. Today, this blog is the first of a multi-part blog on the topic of Hyper-V’s High Availability/Quick Migration capabilities compared to VMware’s VMotion (Live Migration) capabilities.

Before I dive into details, let me take a step back and discuss why high availability is absolutely CRITICAL to virtualization.

Virtualization is an awesome technology. It provides numerous benefits for reducing overall TCO, one of the most obvious benefits being power consumption savings. If you have a data center with 10,000 servers and you cut that number in half with virtualization (2:1 consolidation) you will achieve very tangible power and cost savings by retiring those 5,000 servers. Just look at your monthly power bill. Honestly, 2:1 consolidation is dead simple. (In fact, our own internal IT has been using Virtual Server for years now IN PRODUCTION with over 2,500 virtual machines and easily achieves 8:1 consolidation with four 9’s uptime. With Hyper-V, we see those consolidation ratios climbing in a big way.)

Full Article – http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/04/09/hyper-v-quick-migration-vmware-live-migration-part-1.aspx

Generally speaking, I like to focus my blogs on what we’re doing at Microsoft regarding Hyper-V virtualization and pretend the rest of the Internet doesn’t exist. However, there’s some buzz on the web about a topic that I feel I need to address. Today, this blog is the first of a multi-part blog on the topic of Hyper-V’s High Availability/Quick Migration capabilities compared to VMware’s VMotion (Live Migration) capabilities.

Before I dive into details, let me take a step back and discuss why high availability is absolutely CRITICAL to virtualization.

Virtualization is an awesome technology. It provides numerous benefits for reducing overall TCO, one of the most obvious benefits being power consumption savings. If you have a data center with 10,000 servers and you cut that number in half with virtualization (2:1 consolidation) you will achieve very tangible power and cost savings by retiring those 5,000 servers. Just look at your monthly power bill. Honestly, 2:1 consolidation is dead simple. (In fact, our own internal IT has been using Virtual Server for years now IN PRODUCTION with over 2,500 virtual machines and easily achieves 8:1 consolidation with four 9’s uptime. With Hyper-V, we see those consolidation ratios climbing in a big way.)

Full Article – http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/04/09/hyper-v-quick-migration-vmware-live-migration-part-1.aspx